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Applicability: Difference between revisions
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When it comes to writing thematic stories, there are essentially two methods to go about it: allegory or applicability. Which method you use will depend on how obvious you want your theme to be.
[[J. R. R. Tolkien]] himself hated formal [[allegory]] because the reader was forced to see nothing but the author's POV on what the author considered the theme. In answer to the many allegorical readings of the ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''—which he eventually got tired of getting letters about—he stated the book was not an allegory, but had ''applicability''—the story simply happened to be comparable and applicable to many [[Real Life]] issues.
Applicability is the reader interpreting what the ''theme'' of any given work is. Sometimes a reader's interpretation of the meaning of the story is very different from authorial intent; Works written to be [[Anvilicious]] despite hammering the creator's purposed theme will have an alternate interpretation of the work on part of the audience. Or put another way, writing something that is able to have multiple interpretations, only some of which are those that the author specifically intended. Applicability can give a fictional work different interpretations even on different readings, and is one reason [[Alternate Character Interpretation]] and [[Wild Mass Guessing]] are such active topics in fandoms.
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